Rights and Accountability 11 November 2023
The Israeli weapons firm Smartshooter taking part in a previous French exhibition. (Via Twitter)
Israel’s weapons makers will be displaying their lethal products at a fair in Paris next week.
Smartshooter – which boasts of developing “one shot one hit” technology – is among the Israeli firms taking part in the Milipol exhibition. Opening in the French capital on Tuesday (14 November), the event will provide Smartshooter with an opportunity to showcase its “Smash family” of “fire control systems.”
Some of the firm’s exciting innovations are being tested out on Palestinians.Last year, the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel’s military had installed Smartshooter’s remote controlled weapons at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.
The weapon – then still in its “pilot stage” – has the capacity to “fire stun grenades, tear gas and sponge-tipped bullets,” Haaretz added.
The checkpoint where it was being tested is located on Shuhada Street, part of Hebron which has long been closed to Palestinians by their occupiers.
Smartshooter also makes equipment for the David, one of Israel’s main armored vehicles.
Milipol is being sponsored by France’s interior ministry.The participation of Israeli firms in the event offers a typical example of French duplicity. While France feigns concern for Palestinian civilians – even hosting a conference on humanitarian aid for Gaza – it is busily helping Israel’s weapons makers to boost their exports.
Never again is when?
France is one of many European Union countries assisting Israel at a time when it is flattening Gaza and ramping up its oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank.
As well as buying Israel’s arms, EU governments are authorizing large-scale shipments of weapons and their components to Israel.
The Netherlands, for example, has given the go-ahead in recent weeks for the delivery to Israel of parts used in F-35 fighter jets.
During the first week of November alone, Germany approved weapon deliveries to Israel worth approximately $324 million. That was almost 10 times the value of all German arms export licenses to Israel during 2022 in its entirety.
At least one German politician is behaving as if she runs the European Union at the moment.Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president and a former defense minister in the Berlin government, has reiterated over the past few days her full support for Israel as it carries out a genocide in Gaza.
She has voiced such support at a time when she has been trying to claim that lessons need to be learned from the exterminationist violence unleashed by Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s. That von der Leyen endorses Israel’s exterminationist violence in Gaza illustrates her grotesque dishonesty when she promotes such slogans as “never again is now.”
